Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Google Inc., speaks throughout the Google I/O Developers Conference in Mountain View, California, U.S., on Tuesday, May 8, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google executives are continuing to take care of the fallout from last month’s fumbled announcement of the corporate’s artificial intelligence engine called Bard, but their efforts to scrub up the mess are causing further confusion among the many workforce.
In an all-hands meeting on Thursday, executives answered questions from Dory, the corporate’s internal forum, with a lot of the top-rated issues related to the priorities around Bard, in accordance with audio obtained by CNBC. It’s the primary companywide meeting since Google employees criticized leadership, most notably CEO Sundar Pichai, for the best way it handled the announcement of Bard, Google’s ChatGPT competitor.
Wall Street has punished Google parent Alphabet for the Bard rollout, pushing the stock lower on concern that the corporate’s core search engine is prone to getting displaced as consumers eventually turn to AI-powered responses that allow for more conversational and artistic answers. Staffers called Google’s initial public presentation “rushed,” “botched” and “un-Googley.”
Jack Krawczyk, the product lead for Bard, made his all-hands debut on Thursday, and answered the next query from Dory, which was viewed by CNBC.
“Bard and ChatGPT are large language models, not knowledge models. They’re great at generating human-sounding text, they usually are not good at ensuring their text is fact-based. Why do we expect the massive first application must be Search, which at its heart is about finding true information?”
Krawczyk responded by immediately saying, “I just wish to be very clear: Bard is just not search.”
“It’s an experiment that’s a collaborative AI service that we talked about,” Krawczyk said. “The magic that we’re finding in using the product is absolutely around being this creative companion to helping you be the sparkplug for imagination, explore your curiosity, etc.”
But Krawczyk was quick to follow up by saying, “we are able to’t stop users from attempting to use it like search.”
He said Google continues to be catering to individuals who wish to use it for search, indicating that the corporate has built a recent feature for internal use called “Search It.”
“We’re going to be attempting to recover at generating the queries associated there, in addition to relaying to users our confidence,” Krawczyk said. He added that users will see a tab that claims “view other drafts,” which might point people away from search-like results.
“But as you wish to get into more of the search-oriented journeys, we have already got a product for that — it’s called search,” he said.
The try and separate Bard from search appeared to indicate a pivot within the initial strategy, based on what employees told CNBC and on internal memes that circulated in recent weeks. Within the lead as much as the Bard announcement, Google executives repeatedly said the technology it was developing internally would integrate with search.
Several Google employees, who asked to not be named because they weren’t authorized to talk on the matter, told CNBC that the inconsistent answers from executives has led to greater confusion.
Elizabeth Reid, vp of engineering for search, echoed Krawczyk’s comments on Thursday, specializing in the corporate’s extensive use of enormous language models (LLMs).
“As Jack said, Bard is absolutely separate from search,” Reid said. “We do have a reasonably long history of bringing LLMs into search,” she said, citing models named Bert and Mum.
But while the corporate experiments with LLMs, it desires to “keep the guts of what search is,” Reid said.
In Google’s announcement last month, it mentioned search several times.
“We’re working to bring these latest AI advancements into our products, starting with Search,” the corporate said in a blog post.
That very same week, at an event in Paris, Google search boss Prabhakar Raghavan unveiled some fresh examples of using Bard inside search. And following the announcement, company leaders urged all employees to assist by spending a number of hours testing Bard and rewriting flawed answers, citing a “great responsibility to get it right.”
CNBC also previously reported the corporate was testing various Bard-integrated home search page designs.
One other top-rated query Thursday asked Pichai for various use cases for Bard, since Google employees were asked to assistance on search and “to rewrite queries with factual information.”
“It’s necessary to acknowledge that it’s experimental,” Pichai said in his response. “It’s super necessary to acknowledge the constraints of those products as well.” Those limits are something he’s addressed prior to now.
Pichai said that with Bard, “you might be exposing the power for users to converse with LLMs,” which can improve over time. “And clearly we’re product engineering on top of it,” he said.
“Products like this recover the more the individuals who use them,” Pichai said. “It’s a virtuous cycle.”
‘It’s an intense time’
Following Google’s launch of Bard in February, Alphabet’s stock price dropped almost 9%, suggesting that investors were hoping for more in light of growing competition from Microsoft, which is a big investor in ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
Employees are well aware of how the introduction was received.
“The primary public demo was demoralizing, sent our stock right into a nosedive, and invited massive media coverage,” read an worker comment from Dory that was read aloud. Then got here the query, “What really happened?” and the request to “please share your candid thoughts on what went flawed on the Bard launch.”
Pichai referred the reply Krawczyk, who danced around the topic without giving a direct answer.
“Questions like this could be fair and we would like to reiterate the undeniable fact that Bard has not launched,” Krawczyk said. “We acknowledged to the world that that is something that we’re experimenting with — we’re testing it. But there’s lots of excitement within the industry immediately.”
Krawczyk also referenced an event held at Microsoft’s headquarters that week, wherein the corporate showed off how OpenAI’s technology can power Bing search results and other products.
“You see the stories of ChatGPT coincides with an event that we’re having that was actually focused on search,” Krawczyk said. “There could be challenges across the external perception but, as you heard today, we proceed to give attention to Bard’s testing.”
Krawczyk added that Google is worked up to get the technology in “users’ hands to capture their creativity.”
Pichai chimed in to say, “It’s an intense time.”
“The aim of the blog post was once we decided we were going to external trusted testers, things could leak and it was necessary we positioned it,” Pichai said. “We haven’t launched the product yet. And clearly once we launch, we’ll clarify it’s an experimental product.”
Pichai said that the corporate hopes to offer more details after Google IO, the annual developer conference. Google has yet to announce dates for the event.
One other top-rated worker comment from Dory said, “Launching AI looks as if a knee-jerk response with out a strategy.”
Pichai began his response by noting that Google spends extra money on AI research and development than some other company.
“I disagree with the premise of this query” he said, letting out fun. “We’re deeply working on AI for a very long time. You might be right within the sense that, now we have to remain focused on users and make sure that we’re constructing things that are impactful.” He said, “user input goes to be a crucial a part of the method so it’s necessary to get it right.”
Jeff Dean, head of artificial intelligence at Google LLC, speaks during a Google AI event in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2020.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Jeff Dean, Google’s AI chief, was called upon by Pichai on the all-hands meeting to reply a matter regarding the corporate’s lack of top talent. Specifically, the query asked why Google lost so many key individuals who were listed on a paper about much of the AI technology behind Bard.
“I believe it’s necessary to appreciate this can be a super-competitive field,” Dean said. “Individuals with these sorts of skills are in high demand.”
Dean said Google has “two of the most effective AI research teams on the earth” and “people working side by side on pushing forward the state of art in AI.”
Despite the competition available in the market, “now we have the power to get things out in papers here but additionally work on products that touch on hundreds of thousands of users day by day,” Dean said.
Pichai added that, “Just during the last couple of weeks, we’re talking to some individuals who want to hitch Google who are actually a few of the most effective ML researchers and engineers on the planet.”
A Google spokesperson didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
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